Miranda July’s Fictional Thorny, Horny Pain in the Ass Is a Downright Delight

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On page one of filmmaker and artist Miranda July’s novel The First Bad Man, the narrator, Cheryl Glickman, is driving to a doctor’s appointment, imagining how she might look to passersby on the street and in other cars: “When I stopped at red lights, I kept my eyes mysteriously forward. Who is she? people might have been wondering. Who is that middle-aged woman in the blue Honda?” The sentence exposes the fallacy of Cheryl’s logic: Who looks at a middle-aged woman driving a nondescript car, let alone wonders who she is? No one.

When we first meet her, Cheryl is deep in a decades-long project of self-negation. She practices a “system” of housekeeping that has reduced the effort it takes to live in her apartment to the minimum, rarely washing a dish or even moving across the room without a specific purpose. She doesn’t go out, never entertains. A psychosomatic condition called “globus hystericus” (a phantom lump in her throat) makes it impossible for her to cry, shout, or sometimes even swallow. She has long ago learned to be her “own servant,” requiring little from the world, expecting nothing of others. “After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.”

Of course, Cheryl is monstrously sad, desperately lonely. She harbors a secret crush on Phillip, a member of the board at the nonprofit where she works, pines for a baby, and finds her tidy world thrown into disorder by the arrival of an unwanted houseguest, her bosses’ sensual, messy 20-year-old daughter Clee. By the time Clee arrives, toting a huge purple duffel bag and a surly attitude, July has arranged all her characters on the stage, and we can guess their trajectories. After initial clashes, Clee and Cheryl will form an unlikely, yet mutually rewarding friendship, possibly over a drunken karaoke session. Through this friendship, Cheryl will learn to open her heart, let down her guard, and, hey, maybe touch up her hair and start shaving her legs. She will find the love she craves, not with Phillip, who, we can tell from the first time we see him, is a big jerk, but with the only other apparently single male on the scene, Rick, a mysterious gardener who, we can tell from the first time we see him, has a gentle manner and a kind heart.

The subversive brilliance of July’s novel is that while it has the breezy verve of the sort of chummy novel where all of the above happens, none of it actually does. Cheryl is transformed by love, yes, but not in the way almost every other novel, film, and memoir about a single, early-middle-aged woman tells us she must be in order to function as a viable heroine. There is a sneaky feminist agenda at work here, all the more effective because it’s smuggled into a weird, hilarious, compulsively readable anti-romantic comedy. Like Clee, the book is a timebomb in a velour tracksuit.

Neither spinster aunt, nor tremulous ingénue, nor ugly duckling, nor plucky, precocious child, Cheryl’s a wholly original female character. We meet her fictional male counterparts all the time—ill at ease in the world yet possessed of an uncommon depth of humor and insight (Holden, Portnoy, Mr. Darcy)—and accept without question the universality of their stories and validity of their voices. But on the rare occasions we do meet women like Cheryl in books and on screen, they function as comic relief. Too old to be of reproductive use, too androgynous to be of sexual interest (which is not to say asexual—portions of The First Bad Man are downright filthy), too idiosyncratically prickly in their tastes and habits to be kindly grandmother/wise nun figures, the Cheryls of fiction are genderless clowns in bad perms and thrift store pantsuits.

This is the way most of Cheryl’s associates see her (she has no friends), and they take advantage accordingly. Her manipulative boss tells her she’s a ginjo, a Japanese term for “an elderly man who lives in isolation while he keeps the fire burning for the whole village,” eventually sacrificing his own clothes and bones to the flames. Phillip exploits her crush to justify an affair with an underage girl. Clee liberally abuses her houseguest privileges. Even a box of snails Rick requests for the garden get inside the house and run amok.

Cheryl is poorly treated by the world (all we know of the origin of her globus hystericus is that she’s had it since before she was old enough to drink alcohol, suggesting childhood trauma) but July never engages in special pleading for her character or presents her as a victim. Critics often use the words “precious” and “twee” to describe the characters in July’s films, and onscreen, these doe-eyed, fuzzy-haired creatures often do come across as soft and undefended, garden snails who’ve lost their shells. Cheryl, refreshingly, is a thorny, horny pain in the ass, capable of cruelty and possessed of a tremendous dignity. If you see her driving next to you in her blue Honda you won’t give her another look, but if you read her story in The First Bad Man, you’ll carry her voice in your head for a long time.